Banned by BlogRush!

That’s right, I’ve been banned! And it only took one day! I guess John Chow isn’t the only evil blogger.

I rarely promote any blogging fads but I thought BlogRush deserved the pub and I wanted your referral traffic. 11 of you joined BlogRush yesterday from my referral link… Thanks!

Yesterday evening my computer crashed hard and wouldn’t even boot. Whatever happened also wiped out my ipod. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up around 4AM this morning to fix it. After a lot of screwing around in safe mode it appears to be working again and Sophos hasn’t found a virus. Windows said that Firefox caused the boot problem but didn’t give me the details. Could it be a Microsoft conspiracy to rid the world of Firefox?

Then I checked my site and it said BANNED where I posted the BlogRush Widget. I logged into BlogRush and my account was highlighted in red. No explanation from BlogRush.

11 thoughts on “Banned by BlogRush!”

BlogRush may gain momentum and start feeding all the users a bunch of traffic, but as of right now, it looks like it’s not going well. Most of the huge blog names out there are seeing dismal stats from it, so the small bloggers like myself can expect next to no results from it. I’m giving it a few more days just to see what happens, but it’s on the verge of coming off my site. 🙂

Well, they got the viral part right, but the implementation doesn’t really hold. From the first I heard of it, I’ve had a sense that it’s a flash-in-the-pan.

The big problem, it seems, is that it needs to get above the fold- and most bloggers are putting it way below the fold, where no one will see it.

If I were them, I would have started out much more slowly, hand-picking a list of really, really good blogs- maybe 1000 of them, spread out across various topics.

Then, started by approach a top-100 list of most influential, and trust-worthy, bloggers to build personal relationships with them. Talk to them. See what it would take to get it above the fold. Trouble-shoot it. Fix it up.

If that worked, then you would have the example of having it above the fold. And the people who signed up through, for instance, John Chow or Chris Garrett or whomever, would more than likely follow the example- people tend to do what others are doing.

Once that second tier started to work, and things seemed to be working smoothly, then I would have unleashed the larger viral campaign.

It takes real patience to build these things- most people just want to go for the gusto, but that’s where small problems suddenly become big problems, and end up sinking you.

It was a valiant experiment, but it seems like it’s doomed to fail at this point. Interesting, though.

I don’t think it’s so horrible that you were shut down, Steve. It’s probably a good sign, actually. 😉

It’s funny how hype works. First everyone was pushing BlogRush, now it seems like a ton of people are bashing it. I don’t see what’s so exciting about it. It’s not much more than a traffic exchange program, and those are notorious for send worthless traffic.

I’m curious if they will answer you. I also got that message from BlogRush, and I want to tell you that I’m very much honoured by the company I found myself in, because of them. I even made some nice acquaintances thanks to that happening.